


something akin to

by autoclaves



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Introspection, M/M, Manipulation, Missing Scene Compilation, References to 159, Unhealthy Relationships, could be read as a 4+1, working title for this was 'evil reprehensible men have been divorced 7 times & counting'
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-01
Updated: 2020-05-01
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:41:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23944843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/autoclaves/pseuds/autoclaves
Summary: “Would you kill me, Elias? If the Beholding demanded it of you?”It’s asked placidly, curiously, without any particular inflection. There is a palpable dispassion to Peter’s tone that Elias does not think can be simulated. But perhaps he is just playing into what Peter wants him to think.In any case, his answer is immediate and cruel. “Yes,” he says. “I would kill you. But I would make it quick. And lonely.”“I suppose you would call that love,” Peter muses.(Or: Four conversations about love and death, and one that never happened.)
Relationships: Elias Bouchard/Peter Lukas
Comments: 18
Kudos: 128





	something akin to

**Author's Note:**

> i was like heehee rat bastard and sea captain have been divorced So Much this is the funniest dynamic but then i caught feelings and wrote this in an absolute frenzy !
> 
> the beginning scene is definitely inspired by [this comic](https://tatumsdrawing.tumblr.com/post/615899280851582976/sad-lonely-eyes-from-me-whoops) by the iconic tatumsdrawing which gave me the emotional equivalent of a stroke when i saw it
> 
> title credit in epigraph

_Betrayal and forgiveness are best seen as something akin to falling in love._  
Hannibal 3x03, “Secondo”

—

“Would you kill me, Elias? If the Beholding demanded it of you?” 

It’s asked placidly, curiously, without any particular inflection. There is a palpable dispassion to Peter’s tone that Elias does not think can be simulated. But perhaps he is just playing into what Peter wants him to think.

In any case, his answer is immediate and cruel. “Yes,” he says. “I would kill you. But I would make it quick. And lonely.”

“I suppose you would call that love,” Peter muses. He doesn’t seem alarmed at all by this response; he seems as if he’d expected it. It’s almost disconcerting how quickly Peter knows things, knows him, despite being the diametric opposite of whatever principles the Eye stands for. 

It’s part of why Elias has kept him for so long.

Soon, though, this arrangement will have to come to an end. Peter Lukas must die, that is a certainty. But his death will be Elias’s, that is also a certainty. There is too much history between them for it to happen any other way. Making Peter Lukas’s unavoidable death painless and economical and Lonely is Elias’s burden; his duty of care. The knowledge of it pulsates inside his chest, shuddering like a fearful foreign object.

“I don’t love you.” Rebuttal makes his words harsh. They are a direct betrayal of what he’d been thinking just now.

Peter laughs unkindly. “Of course you do.”

“You don’t need me, Peter, far from it, and yet you keep crawling back. If anything, it’s the opposite.” Elias wraps his fingers around a frigid hand and drags it forward with a jolt. Peter’s arm jerks, a marionette on a string following the snap of his wrist. Once again reaching for Elias like an inexorable thing. In the moonlight, his wedding ring glints out an accusation.

“What does it say about you, then, that you keep taking me back without question?”

Peter wrenches his hand back, and this time, it is Elias’s own ring that is visible in the low light, a betrayal and a testimony both. 

Elias kisses him then, a wretched filthy thing, mostly so Peter will not demand an answer from him. Not that Peter is particularly confrontational in these matters—his preferred method of petty conflict is that of the Lonely, which is to say, he takes a perverse delight in leaving, and knowing that Elias feels the acute ache of missing—but there is perhaps something to be said about how Elias himself does not want to linger on the matter. 

He does not know what his actions say about him. He doubts it is anything good.

—

Elias feels loneliest when Peter is in his bed, even lonelier than when he inevitably wakes alone.

Even when Peter is there, it is as if he is not. That is what it means to be a servant of the Forsaken, he has grown to understand. To have an absence more meaningful than a presence.

“Do you love me?” Elias wonders, voice heavy with compulsion. It’s not the unerring exactitude he normally favors, but right now he has Peter sprawled naked on the bed underneath him. Now is not the time for precision tools—this particular compulsion feels like a blow to the head, and he has no scruples about the fact.

Peter only bites down on his lower lip, keeping his mouth stubbornly shut. The compulsion has dug in its hooks, but his resistance means it’s taking far too long, and Elias arches an eyebrow in displeasure. Another method, then. He snaps his hips downwards languidly; Peter lets out a groan like it’s being wrenched out of him, and his answer slinks out with the noise. 

“Sometimes I hate you, instead.”

He’s always been too good at evasion. Another particular quirk of the Forsaken. They know how to slip past unnoticed.

“That’s not an answer.”

“Mmhm.” Peter runs his gaze up Elias’ chest, hands at his waist forcing him to settle into a cruelly slow rhythm.

“I could force it out of you, the real answer. I could set your mind on fire.”

“Of course you could.” It’s an empty threat and they both know it. They’ve been through every iteration that exists of this song and dance.

“No, your death will be less crude. I know  _ exactly  _ how you like it,” he continues. He bites into Peter’s mouth, the words only half-laced with innuendo.

Peter outright laughs at that. His hands come to rest on Elias’s hipbones and clamp down. There’ll be bruises later at this rate. “You once told me that I don’t need you. That’s not true, Elias,” Peter says, and his breaths come faster now. Elias redoubles his efforts. “I  _ do  _ need you.” The confession is ragged, gutted out of him faster than any compulsion can manage.

Elias snarls. His hand does something particularly punishing. “You do, do you?”

“Can’t live with you, can’t live without,” Peter spits. He’s arching so beautifully, so violently, under Elias’s touch. “And the only reason I say this is because you’re the same way.  _ You  _ need me.”

Elias slaps him then, quick and wicked, but Peter only starts grinning. The curve of it is an uncanny animal thing that eats at him, gnaws on his ribs like it’s trying to get to his heart. It says,  _ I know you. I Know you. _

“Does your beloved Eye tell you this?” His breath hitches one final time, and then he’s coming, but it doesn’t stop him from saying it again in that low, dreadful voice now punctuated with a choking cry—“You need me, Elias.”

That night, Elias feels particularly lonely. Peter has long since fallen asleep, so he simply stares at the small patterns on the ceiling and feels the emptiness spread through him like hunger pangs. He couldn’t quit the sensation if he tried.

—

Peter cradles his knife against Elias’s neck, a gesture loving in its tenderness. The sharpened blade just barely rests on the swell of his throat. A thin cold line and all that remains of their affection now. Or at least, during this part of the cycle. It’s a familiar routine, after all.

“Give me one reason I shouldn’t kill you right now.” Peter’s teeth are bared and he says the words so roughly it almost jars him. Elias draws inwards in fits of real anger; Peter explodes out. Another contradiction, another betrayal to their respective patrons.

“You love me,” Elias murmurs. Peter’s rage is loud enough for the both of them.

“I don’t love. Or have you forgotten what my patron does to men?”

“Love and absence. Hatred and absence. They’re the same thing for us,” he says sharply. “Don’t be uninteresting.” 

“A  _ reason, _ Elias.” The point of the blade slides sideways to caress his jugular before it dips back to its original position, hovering. Cold metal on his throat. Cold metal on his left hand. Two different promises, or maybe the same one.

“I love you.” 

Peter scoffs. He doesn’t even bother to respond to the remark.

Elias leans forward so that the knife digs into skin. The tiniest bit more pressure, and it would draw blood; a lesser man would call this a gesture of surrender. It’s like that that he deals the final blow. 

“I would kill you, Peter,” he says very softly. It works just as well as an answer to Peter’s demand for a reason as it does an exposition to Elias’s earlier admission. “Who else would be left to do that if you killed me now?”

—

“Do you love him? Your Archivist?”

Elias has to think before responding. He draws out the silence like a poison, or a fine wine. “I wouldn’t kill him. I couldn’t bear to.” He can be evasive, too, given the right motivation. Even the truth is capable of being wrapped in pretty circumventions.

He can tell that had been the right answer by the way Peter hums and shifts on the bed. He Knows what’s coming. 

As surely as predicted, like clockwork: “You should marry me again,” Peter says lazily. Triumphantly, now that he’d gotten Elias to admit his attachment to Jon, and more importantly, to admit that it was lesser than his attachment to Peter.

“Which number are we on now, seven?”

“Eight. If we’re counting the incident with the—”

“Yes, that. I don’t particularly care for a repeat.”

Elias thinks disdainfully back to their second marriage. That had been an unmitigated disaster; back before they’d really grasped the terms of this arrangement and learned to live with them. Afterwards, Peter had gone away for so long that he was nearly insubstantial when he came back. Just a mist-torn phantom haunting the doorways. Elias had proposed the next time, mostly to make him stay.

“Is that a yes, Elias?” A calloused palm runs over his wrist, without a fumble despite the lack of light in the room. Something cold and metal is placed into his hand—his ring, a solidly-made band only conspicuous in its absence. Peter doesn’t wait for his answer to slide it on. He supposes that they both already know what it’s going to be. 

“Yes. God knows why.”

“Even vicious cycles have their moments.”

A pause. Elias feels their history unwind, spool its messy layers around them. It’s coming to an end, all of it. It must. For the briefest flash of a second, he thinks that if he could have loved Peter, he would.

“Until death do us part, then.”

They only ever have this conversation in the dark. Some things can only be said by the blind and the blinded.

—

The tide comes in roiling and colorless here. 

This is not so much sea as much as it is marshland, as much as it is some hellish combination of the two. Elias knows better than to assign any human quality to an Entity, but for a moment he indulges himself in the thought that the Lonely is grieving. It certainly feels more feeble. Less tangible, even for a presence that thrives on the insubstantial. Perhaps the Archivist had dealt it a greater blow than previously expected—and  _ that _ is certainly an interesting development, but it is not what Elias has come here for.

He walks steadily inwards. The Lonely calls out to him in desperation, begs to shroud his Eyes with fog. Elias brushes it off easily enough despite the howling emptiness it burdens him with upon retreating; he is used to loss, and even more so now. 

When he finally reaches the place, there is nothing left of Peter Lukas to be found save some darker shreds of mist, Lonely and discontent. There is not even a scattering of bones bleached sea-dry by the tidewater. Not even a silvered wedding ring. 

That is to be expected, of course. 

Elias turns his back on the clearing, sharply. He’s seen the place. With his own physical eyes, even. He’s done what he’d come for, and he’s risking everything just by being here now. 

He tells himself that he is only sorry he hadn’t been the one to finally end it. Peter’s death was meant to be Elias’s, because such devotion was the closest thing he could offer in the place of love. As he leaves, the lapping mist pulls at his sleeves as if tugging him back.

**Author's Note:**

> yeah this ended on a horrible note but let us consider the inherent comedy of whatever was happening in the second scene
> 
> elias, small angry man literally in the middle of having sex: sea boy i'm going to fuckign kill you  
> peter, who has been through this So Many Times: i know this, and i hate you
> 
> reblog this fic [here](https://doctortwelfth.tumblr.com/post/616969437387603968/something-akin-to-the-magnus-archives-ao3)!  
> tumblr: @doctortwelfth


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